Recognizing Achievement Recognizing

Fields Medal Winner Terence Tao

theory, algebraic geometry, number theory, and com- pressed sensing, a new area of applied mathematics. Of special note is his joint work with Ben Green, a Clay Research Fellow from 2005­ through 2007. In their 2004 paper, “The primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions,” the authors answered in the affirmative a long-standing conjecture that had resisted many attempts. Vinogradov settled the case of arithmetic progressions of length 3 in 1939. Since then, however, progress had stalled, and even the case of progressions of length 4 was unresolved. For this and other work, Tao was awarded the Australian Mathematical Society Medal. Terence Tao. Courtesy Reed Hutchinson/UCLA. Tao is also unusual in the attention that he gives to the exposition of mathematics. At his website, one Terence Tao, a Clay Research Fellow from will find, among other things, a list of courses taught 2000 to 2004, was one of four recipients of the Fields with an online edition of his textbook on partial Medals awarded August 22, 2006. The citation differential equations (Math 251B, Spring 2006), read: “for his contributions to partial differential and an archive of over ninety notes on topics ranging equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and from a survey of harmonic analysis to the Black- additive number theory.” The other awardees were Scholes formula in mathematical finance. More Andrei Okounkov, Grigori Perelman and Wendelin recently Tao started a blog. It makes for excellent Werner. reading and includes many of his recent lectures, including the Simons Lectures at MIT on structure Tao, born in 1975, is a native of Adelaide, Australia. and randomness, the Ostrowski lecture in Leiden on He began learning calculus as a seven-year-old high the uniform uncertainty principle and compressed school student and by age eleven was well known sensing, and the ACM Symposium talk on the in international math competitions. After graduating condition number of randomly perturbed matrices. from Flinders University in Australia with a Masters There are also detailed notes on other lectures, e.g., Degree, Tao earned his Ph.D. from Princeton Shing-Tung Yau’s, What is a Geometric Structure, in University under the direction of Elias Stein. He the Distinguished Lecture Series at UCLA, as well as then joined UCLA’s faculty, where he became full talks and notes intended for more general audiences: professor at age twenty-four. Tao has also held The cosmic distance ladder, a talk given to UCLA professorships at the Mathematical Sciences Institute chapter of the Pi Mu Epsilon society, and Advice on and Australian National University in Canberra. mathematical careers, and mathematical writing. Tao has also written an article on Perelman’s recent Among Tao’s many awards are the Salem Prize spectacular work. in 2000, the Bôcher Prize in 2002, and the Clay Research Award in 2003. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. On the web:

Tao’s work is astonishing not only in its depth and Home page: www.math.ucla.edu/~tao originality, but also in its quantity and breadth. Blog: terrytao.wordpress.com He is the author of more than 140 papers, about three- quarters of which have been written with one or more Article on Perelman’s work: arXiv:math/0610903 of fifty collaborators. While the core of his work to Interview: www.claymath.org/library date has been concentrated in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, it ranges from dynamical systems to combinatorics, representation

2006